Bottom Line:
The field measurements showed that WUE of M. lutarioriparius in the semiarid location was significantly higher than that in the wet location.It was also found that the relatively high expression variation of the WUE-related genes was affected to a larger extent by environment than by genetic variation.The study demonstrates that transcriptome-wide correlation between physiological phenotypes and expression levels offers an effective means for identifying candidate genes involved in the adaptation to environmental changes.

Mentions:
Quantitative real-time PCR was performed by using 15 randomly sampled individuals from each field site for eight genes, psbH, psbI, psbK, ycf4, petE, OAT4, RH57, and rps4 (Table 4). The relative expression levels determined by the two methods were significantly correlated for all eight genes (Spearman’s rank correlation test, P <0.01; Fig. 5).

Bottom Line:
The field measurements showed that WUE of M. lutarioriparius in the semiarid location was significantly higher than that in the wet location.It was also found that the relatively high expression variation of the WUE-related genes was affected to a larger extent by environment than by genetic variation.The study demonstrates that transcriptome-wide correlation between physiological phenotypes and expression levels offers an effective means for identifying candidate genes involved in the adaptation to environmental changes.